Smart Array Performance - HP 273914-B21 - Smart Array 6404/256 RAID Controller Technology Brief

Smart Array performance

This section presents results of HP testing for sequential read/write performance between Smart Array
controller P411, announced in April 2009, and the previous generation P800. The charts in Figures
3, 4, and 5 compare the maximum performance for each Smart Array controller across the queue
depth in each data range. The same queue depth (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256) and stripe size
(256 KB) was used for all testing.
It should be noted that the two controllers operated under different PCI bandwidth constraints. While
the DL380 G5 server/P800 configuration operated at 3Gb SAS PCIe Gen 1 speeds, the DL380 G6
server/P411 configuration operated at 6Gb SAS PCIe-2 speeds.
The maximum sequential write performance of the P411in the RAID 0 test, Figure 3, was
approximately 100 percent higher than that of the P800. These performance gains are largely due to
bandwidth differences between 3Gb SAS PCI Gen 1 and 6Gb SAS PCIe-2.
Figure 3. Maximum sequential read/write performance for the Smart Array P800 and P411
controllers in a RAID 0 environment
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
4KB 64KB
SEQ SEQ
READ READ
P411, 512MB, fw:2.50, RAID 0 (256KB), D2700, 14-146GB SFF 6Gb SAS 15K, DL380-G6 P411, 512MB, fw:2.50, RAID 0 (256KB), D2700, 14-146GB SFF 6Gb SAS 15K, DL380-G6
P800, 512MB, fw:7.00, RAID 0 (256KB), MSA70, 14-146GB SFF 3Gb SAS 15K, DL380-G5 P800, 512MB, fw:7.00, RAID 0 (256KB), MSA70, 14-146GB SFF 3Gb SAS 15K, DL380-G5
RAID-0, Maximum performance
512KB 1MB 4KB
SEQ SEQ SEQ
READ READ WRITE
64KB 128KB 256KB
SEQ SEQ SEQ
WRITE WRITE WRITE
512KB
SEQ
WRITE
11